the snakeskin

There was nothing unusual about discovering a snakeskin in the woods. That year the warm undergrowth had been alive with the hiss and slither of adders. As Ian had walked through the naked brightness of early spring he'd already heard them crackling among the brambles.

When the April rains came - pummelling the dry leaves into the soil - the snakes slept, shivering beneath fallen branches. And Ian sat at home watching TV and rain running down windows. It seemed like the showers would never stop. But when, of course, they did, the wood exploded into life, like a butterfly bursting, miraculous and immaculate, from the soggy self-digestion of its pupal sarcophagus. And as Ian resumed his walks along the wood's still muddy paths, he'd once again heard the snakes - the smooth scrape of scale on stem as they slid through a slalom of freshly sprouted bracken and bluebell stems.

That spring the snakes had gone wild. Whether it was the mild winter, the heavy rains or some invisible aphrodisiac, the experts could not say, but trackers, who knew and watched the secret places among the rhododendrons and redwoods where the snakes gathered, reported with great excitement that they had never before witnessed such orgies, such cold-blooded passion, such tangled writhings of reptilian desire.

In the local newspapers, there were pictures of men wearing camouflage jackets and khaki sun hats holding fistfuls of dangling, diamond-backed bodies, limp trophies of varying width and length, all bludgeoned to death by the same thick branch (the same thick bastards).

When he saw those pictures, Ian always felt a deep stab of indignation, a bitter hatred of the ignorance that bred those blithe atrocities. The feeling was tempered slightly by the knowledge that there were plenty more snakes that survived. However, the thought that someone could actually enjoy tracking down and killing such a beautiful creature made Ian's guts churn. It wasn't as if the snakes leapt out at you. To kill so many snakes would take several hours, if not days, spent beating through the bracken. For although you could hear the snakes, you would seldom see them, basking in hidden pools of sunlight, slick heads raised to lick vibrations from the air - ready, at the merest taste of footsteps, to instinctively slither away, invisible against the dry peaty earth, the deep litter of curling golden leaves and diamond chunks of mottled, deer-chewed bark.

Although Ian only ever saw one snake that summer, he found many snakeskins in the wood. At first, he was alarmed at the frequency of his discoveries, imagining some biblical plague of serpents building up beneath the bracken. He told his dad about the snakeskins.

"There's loads of them," he said. "Loads of skins."

"It's hardly surprising," said his dad, a self-proclaimed expert on everything, his voice becoming deeper and louder, the words more deliberately pronounced, as they always were when he was called upon to answer a question. "That's the way snakes grow. They fill up one skin and when they get too big for it, they grow another and then another and another." His hands started to spiral through the air, describing larger and larger circles.

"I know that," said Ian. "But why are there so many of them?

"It stands to reason," said Ian's dad, his fingers twisting through each other like those mating serpents. "For every snake there are several skins, you see, and the skins don't move when they hear you coming. They're just left there for people to find. And, of course," he separated his hands and wagged a finger in the air to emphasise the point, "the skins are opaque so they aren't camouflaged like the snakes. If the snakes were white you'd see lots of them. But, you can't see them because they have evolved to be the same colour as the bracken and the leaves."

For a moment after he had finished talking, his hands still moved as if he were tumbling dried leaves through his fingers, then fell lifeless loosely locked together into his lap. He smirked, pleased at the fullness of the answer he had been able to provide his son. "Does that answer your question?"

"Yes, thanks dad," said Ian, bashfully returning his father's rare smile, eyes cast down at the pattern of the living room carpet, silently counting repeated squares of large crimson flowers.

Ian was not particularly satisfied by his father's answer, which (as usual) addressed every question except the one he'd asked - why were there so many snakeskins that summer? It continued to worry Ian, who was prone to obsessions, at least that's what his teacher said. He had a tendency to think too hard about things, the teacher told Ian's mother, forever asking unnecessary questions. An attention-seeker lacking in self-confidence, she wrote in the private files she kept at home locked in the drawer beneath a shelf of mainly American books on child psychology (a three volume set by the Illinois University Press on juvenile insecurity and adult personality disorders being among her favourites).

Further into the summer the snakeskins disappeared as mysteriously as they had appeared, as if vaporised by the incessant heat. Day after day the temperatures continued to rise. One by one all records were broken. Thermometers, brought in a rush at the beginning of the summer, were incredulously returned to shops as being faulty. Cricket pitches cracked and, with the banning of hose pipes, became unplayable. Horses, tails swishing at angry flies, galloped around fields for no reason and then lay down on their sides as if dead . And the colours of trees and paths in the wood were burned up, until all were different shades of ash and the horizon became a chalk picture floating on streams of hot air.

Eventually, although it didn't rain until some weeks later, the summer started to cool. And Ian had all but forgotten about the snakeskins, which made his discovery, late in August, all the more startling. Normally when you find the skin of an adder it looks like a piece of discarded polythene, the wrinkled wrapper of a supermarket baguette, twisted and torn. But the skin he discovered that day was completely intact. More remarkable, the skin formed a near perfect circle, the snake biting its own tail, eye lenses intact, every scale perfect.

It seemed unlikely, even to a dreamer like Ian, that the young adder, as it was wriggling out of its own mouth, had somehow at random formed that circle. Probably someone had already found the skin and placed it like that. However, to discover the skin prearranged in such a way gave it a magical significance. The circle of skin seemed such a beautiful, mysterious thing that Ian didn't really want to pick it up. Ideally he would have left it there, to remain undisturbed for years, but he knew if he did the winds of autumn would only blow it away, or a badger snuffling for insects would rip it apart with digging claws, or one of those men would come with their sticks, bash in its eye lenses and pound it into the decaying bracken, in practice for next spring.

So, Ian took the skin home and carefully laid it on a sheet of paper in an old tin he found in the kitchen. The tin had once contained chocolates and smelled of Christmas. For a moment, just after he'd opened it, Ian vividly pictured his mum and his sister cutting mince pie shapes in pastry, the kitchen full of steam, Brussels sprouts floating in the sink, red paper lanterns and the taste of paper chain gum. Inside the tin, the snakeskin reflected against the polished inner surface, like some delicate silver foil decoration. He shut the lid and put the tin in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.

Soon after Ian had found the circle of skin, the drought ended with a tremendous storm that lasted for two days. The day the storm ended Ian, trousers soaked as he waded through dripping bracken, saw his first live snake. The snake was sitting in front of a decayed log above the edge of a small pond in a hollow in the undergrowth about fifty yards from the main path which twisted through the wood, from the back of the estate to a lay-by alongside the main road.

There was no sun that afternoon, and the snake, which was about two feet long and the width of a slender courgette, was half covered by leaves. Ian sat for the best part of an hour watching the snake as it lay there motionless, its tongue occasionally flicking in and out to lazily taste the air.

Eventually, Ian started to feel the cold through his damp clothes and decided to go home. At the edge of his back garden, which bordered onto the wood, he saw his older brother Stewart with two friends John and Tim. Tim was extremely tall and thin with dark hair and long limbs that assured he always won the high jump at school sports day by several inches. Because he was so tall people always treated him as if he were an adult, which is what he always seemed to be, although at thirteen he was only a couple of years older than Ian was.

John was also thirteen, but, in contrast to Tim, was wildly immature. He had sandy hair and freckles and thick arms that would sometimes unexpectedly and inexplicably grab your neck in a choking arm lock. John desperately wanted to be a goalkeeper, but was far too short. In the woodland clearings where they played 'headers and volleys' or 'three and in,' he would always claim that the ball had gone the wrong side of the short branches pushed into the turf for posts or over an imaginary cross bar.

Although Ian had meant to keep the snake a secret, he couldn't resist telling them about it. Tim seemed to believe him and immediately wanted to go and see it. John said he didn't believe Ian and twisted his arm behind his back to see if he was telling the truth or not. When Ian insisted he had seen a snake, John twisted his arm further behind his back. Ian gave a sharp cry of pain which made Tim yank John away. Stewart just stood and watched.

With Ian massaging his arm, John collecting handfuls of stones to throw at the snake and Tim stripping the leaflets from a frond of bracken, they made their way through the undergrowth to the small pond. Stewart refused to go on any further mumbling that mum had warned them not to go too far off the path as it might be dangerous, as if there were some nameless, monster lurking in the rhododendrons, a warty, wild haired ogre who ate little boys for breakfast. John and Tim laughed at Stewart and followed Ian on through the brackens, but as they got near the pond Ian suddenly stopped.

Standing near the edge of the hollow was indeed an ogre; a whiskery, warty man with grimy layers of cloth hanging from him like the skins of a rotten onion. He was pissing into the shallow water. As the boys crouched down in the bracken John skimmed a stone into the pond. The stone landed with a sudden splash, startling the man so much he slipped backwards on the wet moss of the bank and dribbled down his leg.

The man spotted the three boys watching him, and with a roar lifted himself up and stumbled straight across the pond towards them, arms outstretched like some kind of B-Movie Frankenstein monster, as they scrambled away through the brambles to climb some nearby fir trees. Straddling branches they threw fir cones down at the man, laughing as if it were all some kind of playground game as he pounded his fists on the trunk of the tree below, ducking away from the aerial bombardment, cursing incomprehensibly in some foreign language, until a large jagged stone, thrown hard by John, caught him on the right temple, and, with blood streaming down his face, he turned and staggered back into the undergrowth.

After a few minutes when they were sure the strange man had gone, they climbed down the tree and ran home. John, all cocky after having made the man's head bleed, still didn't believe Ian had seen that adder by the pond. He insisted on picking up twisted stick after twisted stick, jeering 'are you sure this isn't your snake,' long after Ian or Tim had stopped taking any notice of him.

It was on the first day of the new term that Ian's mum discovered the snakeskin in the old chocolate tin. Ian was sitting half-dressed on his bed, when he heard his mum angrily calling to him from the kitchen. Thinking that she was just hurrying him along so that he wouldn't be late for school , Ian had jogged downstairs happily tucking his shirt into his trousers and looking forward to a big bowl of Rice Krispies. But when he entered the kitchen and saw the skin lying beside a pile of half-made sandwiches, his heart fell.

As he entered the kitchen, a brief smile twisted across his mother's face, as if some hidden part of her found the discovery of the snakeskin amusing. For a split second the smile suggested she was about to laugh and tousle his hair and say 'you idiot' in a friendly, happy way. But then suddenly her teeth bit together and her eyes hardened, as if irritated by that rash smile, and the subsequent relief that had lit up in her son's foolish eyes.

She poked at the crumpled snakeskin with the bread knife and asked, "What did you think you were playing at, bringing that filth into my kitchen?"

As she raised her free hand, Ian, sensing a slap, flinched away and banged his head hard into the corner of a shelf. He slumped down the wall, with bottled spices and recipe books clattering around his head.

"Now look what you've done, you silly little shit," said his mum, kicking at his knees with a fluffy blue slipper. "Come on, come on you don't expect me to clear this bloody lot up."

Cowering on the floor, he started lamely to sweep the spices and broken glass into a pile using the side of his finger.

"Not with you hand," said his mum, kicking through the pile he'd just made. "Get the bloody brush."

"Where is it?" Ian mumbled weakly, lifting his hand to his face to wipe away a wetness he thought must be olive oil or something. He saw red on his hand and looked up frightened at his mother, whose thin face was white and twitching like a demented mouse.

"Jesus, do you do this to me on purpose? Do you? You moron." She grabbed the sleeve of Ian's jumper and yanked him to his feet. As she did so the tautened wool beneath his armpit cut into his soft flesh, making him yelp. But, ignoring his discomfot, she tugged him closer and peered with distaste at the blood that seeped from a cut just above his eye and dribbled down his cheek. "Jesus Christ," she said, and dragged him into the hall.

Through blood-blurred eyes Ian saw Stewart and his sister, Lorraine, stood neatly by the front door holding their bags.

"Go on, don't just stand there, go and get into the car," ordered Ian's mum, as she dragged him upstairs to the bathroom. "Why do you do this to me? Stewart doesn't behave like this. Jesus Christ."

Ian stood outside the classroom. The corridor smelt of fresh paint as it always did after the summer holidays. The floor gleamed with polish and the walls were covered with acres of fresh purple card, ready to mount the poster-paint self-portraits of a hundred precocious infants.

The cut above Ian's eye still stung slightly, with occasional twinges of irritation rather then pain that made his eyelid twitch as if he were repeatedly winking. He reached up to feel the TCP-soaked ball of cotton wool that was attached to his face by a long strip of sticky plaster. He tried to loosen the plaster a little, but it was stuck to his eyebrow and tugged like torture at the short hairs. He left it alone and listened to his mum who was explaining to Miss Bennett what had happened. They were both laughing as if it were all a tremendous joke.

"Honestly, Ian you must learn to concentrate more," said Miss Bennett turning to him. "You can be quite a bright boy when you put your mind to it, but you see what happens when you don't pay attention to what you're doing. Fancy walking into a shelf like that. You were lucky you didn't lose your eye."

Ian said nothing. He couldn't be bothered to tell her that he hadn't exactly walked into the shelf, that he had in fact been flinching from his mother's upturned palm (something she had neglected to tell Miss Bennett). He stood there sulkily scuffing his new shoes (or rather Stewart's old shoes) on the floor.

"Don't do that to your new shoes," hissed his mother. She smiled apologetically at Miss Bennett, who smiled in sympathy.

Ian continued to scuff belligerently.

"Ian," snapped his mother.

"Ian," echoed Miss Bennett angrily.

He stopped scuffing.

"Honestly Ian," said Miss Bennett. "You must learn to do as you are told. You're not being clever you know." She paused and looked meaningfully at the shut classroom door beyond which the sound of excited kids was growing louder, and added sarcastically, "There's no one to show off to out here."

She smirked at Ian's mother who looked accusingly at her son as if he were committing some further crime just by standing there.

"What?" said Ian, glaring up at them both.

"You know very well what I mean," said Miss Bennett.

His mother nodded.

"You do as Miss Bennett says," she said, and smiled apologetically as Ian dragged the toe of his shoe discreetly across the rubbery floor.

Even with the curtain pulled right across the window, the light of the moon still shone into his face like a lamp in an interrogation room. Whenever he opened his eyes it was there shining down at him, lighting the room like it was midday rather than midnight. Ian couldn't sleep anyway. He raised his hand to feel under the fresh bandage, tracing the ridge of crisp blood on the edge of his eyelid with the tip of his little finger.

"I wish I were a snake," he hissed out loud. "I'd bite your bloody neck and poison you to death. Then you'd be bloody sorry. You and that Miss Bennett. You're a bitch you are Miss Bennett, just like her. A big fat bitch."

Neither Miss Bennett nor his mum were particularly big or fat, but it made him better to say it. And he felt a bit happier as he lay there thinking how great it would be to turn into a snake and slither off into the woods. What a shock his mum would have if she started shouting at him in the morning and, when she came upstairs to see where he was, discovered nothing in the bed but a huge, scaly skin. Then she'd be sorry. The big fat bitch.

And suddenly a crazy idea began to form in his mind. What if she really were to come upstairs in the morning and find a snakeskin lying there...

In the moonlight, frosted brambles shone like barbed wire as he edged closer to the pond, his trainers crunching intrusively in the night's silence. He felt like an impostor, a daylight being gate-crashing some secret nocturnal society. The stalks of bracken thrust up from beneath the earth like decaying arm bones, reaching out to unmask him, to tear the skin from his face, reveal the dry skull beneath, make him as they were, drag him down into the stagnant pond, a world of upside down trees where the moon was reflected like the light at the end of a tunnel to the underworld.

Shivering with cold and fear Ian walked on, feeling part-zombie already, crunching closer to where the snake lay long and white, its blind eyes like drops of liquid moonlight. For a moment, half-dreaming, he imagined it really was a white snake then realised, suddenly awake, that it was just another skin. He reached out to touch the smooth scales. Just as his finger tips made contact with the snake a bearded face rose up from behind the rotted trunk and screamed like a child and Ian, echoing that scream, turned and ran back through the trees, brambles tearing at the legs of his pyjamas. He stumbled onto the main path and sprinted into the back garden, crashed through the kitchen door, up the stairs and into bed with his trainers and jacket still on. He pulled the sheets over his head and lay perfectly still, listening to his father fumble reluctantly in the cupboard under the stairs for a torch and a cricket bat, with which to pretend to go hunting for burglars in the back garden.

For a couple of days Ian resisted the temptation to go back into the woods, until John and Tim and Stewart and a couple of other lads grudgingly invited him to come and play football with them in the clearing, just to make up the numbers. With the score at fourteen-eleven (or seventeen-eleven including those goals that John insisted had cleared the invisible cross bar) they followed Ian into the wood to see if the latest snakeskin was still there. They discovered the skin on the far side of the small pond - carefully arranged, tail-in-mouth, on a nest of leaves.

"It's a beauty," said Tim, long jumping the pond to get a closer look at it, as the others carefully made their way round the slippery edge of the hollow.

"I bet you just put it there," said John, grinding the skin up with his toes and kicking it into the pond. They threw stones at it then, trying to make it sink, until only its head poked above the surface and Stewart finally finished it off with the football, which splashed dully in the peaty black water.

They walked back to the path throwing the dirty ball at each other. As Ian dodged a close range throw from John, he looked sideways through the trees and saw the old man, camouflaged by his dirty layers of clothing, shuffling through distant undergrowth with a dead badger across his shoulders and a dark scab on his forehead from where John had hit him on the head with that stone.

Ian retrieved the ball from a patch of brambles and kicked it out of the trees and into clearing, the others chasing Stewart and John as they raced out after it.